This invention relates to rack apparatuses for shelves or containers receiving foods in a refrigerator, or for cupboards or cabinets in kitchen, warehouse or the like. In particular, the invention relates to rack apparatuses that enable shifting of receiving position to back and fore or to up and down.
In these years, refrigerators or kitchen cupboards for example are in a trend of becoming larger with respect to internal volume, in connection with diversification of dietary pattern. Especially in refrigerators for households, jumbo ones having over-400-liter internal volume are of mainstream; which have external height of about 180 cm along with larger and larger sizes in width and depth.
Concurrent with this, internal volume of each compartment, such as a fresh food compartment or a vegetable compartment becomes larger and larger. FIG. 19 shows an arrangement of the compartments in a refrigerator; at upper part of the refrigerator is disposed a fresh food compartment (52) of large internal storage volume and being most frequently used; and disposed therebelow are a vegetable compartment (53) and a freezer compartment (54). The fresh food compartment (52) is equipped with a door (56) that is hinged at right or left side of a front opening of the compartment as to close up the front opening freely openable and re-closable. The vegetable compartment (53) and the freezer compartment (54) are in a form of drawer container that is attached on inside of respective door, in consideration of easiness of taking items into and from the compartments. In the fresh food compartment (52), shelves (55) are disposed as to partition the compartment into several stages or stories and as to receive food items on each shelf or rack opening.
Highest one of the shelves (55) is located at height of about 160 cm from room floor and depth of that shelf is large; when external height of the refrigerator is about 180 cm and the fresh food compartment (52) is disposed at upper part of the refrigerator as mentioned before. Thus, for the persons of short stature, job of taking food items into and from rack opening on the highest shelf is troublesome; and moreover, it is rather hard job to look into how the items are stored on the highest shelf, in particular, to utilize back side part on the highest shelf.
In view of this, there is proposed a following construction of the shelves: highest shelf is formed of fore and back pieces, which are to be superimposed with each other at back side; such superimposing is made when difficulty for utilizing the back side portion being arisen due to presence of fore part of the highest shelf; in this manner, it is facilitated reaching of hand of the person to the back side portion. Meanwhile, JP-2001-50648A (Unexamined patent publication of Japan No. 2001-50648) proposes a construction of shelves in which height of a shelf other than the highest one is freely adjustable.
When the highest shelf is formed of such back and fore pieces, area for receiving the food items is reduced by half if to achieve enough easiness to utilize the shelf. Meanwhile, in a construction proposed in JP-2001-50648A, such height-adjustable shelf may come to contact with items on a downward adjacent shelf and to impair storing on the downward adjacent shelf when the height-adjustable shelf is shifted downward.
In view of the above problems, this is to facilitate easiness in utilizing of a shelf or rack opening at a quite height within an internal storing volume, by enabling upward and downward shift of the shelf or a container with easy and slight job of the user; and it is in same time to eliminate interference to the items on the downward adjacent shelf as to achieve high utilization ratio of the internal storing volume.